Tag: politics

The Mother Mirror: How Susie Wiles Became Donald Trump’s Surrogate Matriarch

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by Daniel Wolfe, J.D., Ph.D.

(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any employer, organization, or institution with which the author is affiliated. )

“Trust in God and be true to yourself.” — Donald Trump (attributed to his mother)


In a career defined by glitz, volatility, and domination, Donald Trump has rarely ceded power or emotional intimacy to anyone—especially not to women. And yet, two women stand apart from the parade of advisers, media figures, and family members who have passed through his orbit: Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, his late mother; and Susie Wiles, his current White House Chief of Staff and perhaps the most enduring political influence in his life.

From a psychodynamic standpoint, their connection is more than incidental. Wiles’s quiet dominance, maternal distance, and unflappable loyalty appear to mirror key psychological traits that Trump associated with his mother—a woman he revered, idealized, and never fully reached. As Trump now enters what may be the final chapter of his public life, Wiles is not merely a staffer. She is, in many respects, a surrogate matriarch—a stabilizing figure who satisfies his need for emotional containment, maternal loyalty, and internal order.

The Queen from Tong: Mary Anne MacLeod Trump’s Silent Influence

Born in 1912 in the Village of Tong on Scotland’s windswept Isle of Lewis, Mary Anne MacLeod was the tenth of ten children in a Gaelic-speaking, deeply Presbyterian household. The family home had no indoor plumbing, and her childhood was shaped by poverty, discipline, and religious rigor. At 18, she boarded the SS Transylvania and sailed to New York City, alone, with $50 to her name and a stated intention to become a domestic servant.

What followed was a dramatic social ascent. Mary Anne met Fred Trump, a rising real estate developer, at a party. They married in 1936 and had five children. Though she never shed her Scottish accent, she fully embraced American prosperity and Protestant respectability. She became active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, volunteered in hospitals, and dressed with regal precision.

As reported by journalist Mary Pilon in The New Yorker, friends and family members remembered Mary Anne MacLeod Trump as “tight-lipped,” “polished,” “proper,” “unassuming,” “friendly,” and “pleasant”—a reserved woman of dignity and discipline, but not demonstratively affectionate. Trump himself noted her deep reverence for public ceremony, stating, “Her loyalty to Scotland was incredible. She respected and loved the Queen.” He also credited her with influencing his “sense of showmanship.” (Pilon, 2016).

In her memoir Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump—herself a clinical psychologist—describes how her grandmother’s illness and retreat from family caregiving duties created emotional voids. Mary and her siblings took on caretaking roles in her absence, leading to feelings of abandonment and shaping Donald Trump’s later emotional defenses. She further details how Fred Trump Sr.’s emotional detachment and controlling behavior created insecurity in the family and contributed to Donald Trump’s narcissistic tendencies.

And yet Donald idolized his mother. “Part of her disinterest was, I believe, interpreted by Donald as exclusivity,” Mary Trump writes. “She was mysterious. The less she said, the more he needed to earn her attention.” From a psychodynamic perspective, this creates a powerful early template: a mother who is emotionally withheld but idealized—instilling in the child a lifelong yearning to gain her approval, or to replicate her presence through proxies.

In object relations theory, such a mother becomes an internalized object—a kind of psychic icon. She represents containment, elegance, structure—but also loss and emotional distance. The boy grows into a man who seeks out women who resemble her not in warmth, but in silence, dignity, and control.

The Strategist in the Shadows: Who Is Susie Wiles?

Susie Wiles is no stranger to male power. The daughter of legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, she grew up surrounded by high-stakes masculinity. But unlike many women in Trump’s orbit—Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, Karoline Leavitt—Wiles is not a media figure. She is a tactician. Her professional life has been spent in the background, managing Republican campaigns with ruthless efficiency, from Jack Kemp to Rick Scott to Ron DeSantis—and finally to Donald Trump.

She first joined the Trump campaign in 2016 to oversee Florida, and her work was credited as critical to his win. She returned in 2020 and again in 2024. In the chaos of Trump’s third presidential campaign, Wiles outlasted and outmaneuvered more combative or flamboyant aides. By 2025, she was named Chief of Staff—the first woman to ever hold the role under Trump. And perhaps the only one who truly commands his respect.

What makes Susie Wiles unique is not charisma or ideological purity but emotional restraint. She doesn’t grovel. She doesn’t scold. She doesn’t leak to the press. According to Politico Magazine and West Wing Playbook, Wiles is a discreet, disciplined strategist. She rarely seeks publicity and is consistently portrayed as a “steady hand” who effectively manages Trump’s impulses and internal chaos.

From a psychological standpoint, this demeanor taps directly into the mother archetype that Trump internalized: a woman who offers structure without intrusion, loyalty without dependence. She doesn’t try to be his friend or surrogate daughter. She is, psychologically, his mother in political form: elegant, efficient, and emotionally self-contained.

Recent reporting in Vanity Fair highlights the candid nature of Wiles’s own reflections on President Trump and members of his Cabinet, revealing an unusually frank assessment of internal dynamics, including comments on Trump’s personality and other senior officials—remarks that drew swift criticism from within the administration as being misrepresented or taken out of context. Vanity Fair journalist Chris Whipple, who conducted months of on-the-record interviews with Wiles, subsequently defended the accuracy of his piece, noting that all conversations were recorded and verified.

The Vanity Fair profile also underscores Wiles’s complex role: though she offered unusually candid characterizations of Trump and others in his orbit—comments that were later disputed as being selectively framed—she remained publicly loyal, reiterating her defense of Trump’s leadership and the administration’s accomplishments. This juxtaposition further illustrates the delicate psychological balance Wiles maintains: revealing enough about internal pressures to demonstrate credibility, yet steadfast in her alignment with Trump’s public persona.

The Vanity Fair interviews portray Wiles as central to both decision-making and narrative control inside the West Wing, a portrayal that has attracted debate not only about the content of her remarks but also about the media framing of her role—revealing once again how Wiles both shapes and buffers Trump’s inner circle.

A Psychodynamic Reading: Maternal Transference in Power Relationships

In classical Freudian terms, Wiles may represent a maternal transference object—a figure onto whom Trump projects unresolved feelings and unmet needs from childhood. Where Mary Anne withheld affection, Wiles withholds emotion. Where Mary Anne offered structured approval, Wiles offers structured control. And unlike Trump’s past advisers, Wiles never threatens his fragile ego. She doesn’t seek glory. She simply stays—a feat few others have achieved.


Psychological profiles consistently depict Donald Trump as a grandiose, high-energy, low-agreeableness figure—a volatile combination described by Dr. Dan McAdams as “sky-high extraversion … rock-bottom agreeableness … and grandiose narcissism” (McAdams, 2016). Indirect diagnostic work (Immelman & Griebie, 2020) places him squarely in narcissistic, dominant, and impulsive personality patterns. Mental health experts in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump warn of malignant narcissism—a severe form characterized by interpersonal cruelty and paranoia (Lee, 2019). Clinicians like Craig Malkin and theorists such as Kohut and Bosson also point to the deeper emotional void underlying Trump’s persona—one that maternal transference figures may uniquely address. Therapists such as Wendy Behary similarly argue for a behavioral-based understanding of his narcissistic structure.

Nancy McWilliams (2011) describes narcissistic personality organization as marked by internal fragility, frequent use of idealization and devaluation, and a reliance on external validation. She explains that analysts working with this type often become unconscious “containers” for projected emotions, experiencing emotional obliteration, boredom, or invisibility.

As interpreted from McWilliams, transference figures often exert their power not through what they do, but through how they resonate. They become stand-ins for an early internal object—particularly in individuals who, like Trump, display signs of narcissistic personality structure: grandiosity, need for adulation, fear of shame, and an unconscious desire for omnipotent control.

What narcissistic individuals crave, McWilliams notes, is not just admiration—but a “containing other”: someone who does not collapse in the face of their outbursts, and who does not betray them by seeking autonomy. Wiles plays that role impeccably. She withstands Trump’s rage, channels it, and survives it. She offers maternal containment, not romantic or filial rivalry. That is what keeps her in his orbit.

Other advisers have challenged Trump (John Kelly), manipulated him (Steve Bannon), or infantilized him (Rudy Giuliani). Wiles does none of that. Instead, she mirrors back the qualities Trump yearned to see in his mother: discretion, loyalty, restraint, and elegance.

The Politics of Maternal Containment

This is not just a psychological curiosity. It is a political reality. Wiles has arguably had more sustained influence over Trump than any adviser since the beginning of his political career. She shaped the tone of his 2024 campaign—more disciplined, less erratic. She consolidated staffing, minimized legal exposure, and even managed access to the President.

Unlike previous chiefs of staff, Wiles does not appear to negotiate with Trump’s narcissism. She regulates it. That regulation—the ability to soothe without submitting—represents a maternal function in psychodynamic theory. And in Wiles, Trump may have finally found the mother he idealized but never emotionally possessed.

It also explains why he hasn’t turned on her. Trump, infamous for discarding aides with theatrical vengeance, has remained steadfastly loyal to Wiles. Even when others within his inner circle reportedly questioned her influence, he resisted. Just as a child resists separating from a “good enough” mother (in Winnicottian terms), Trump clings to Wiles not just as a strategist, but as a psychic anchor. In effect, Wiles might stabilize Trump not by commanding him, but by quietly containing him, as a good-enough mother does for an emotionally vulnerable child.

A Closing Reflection: The Boy and the Queen

As Donald Trump enters the final act of his storied and polarizing career, it is Susie Wiles—not his children, not his ideological acolytes—who quietly holds the reins. She does so not by reflecting Trump’s aggression, but by embodying his mother’s mystery: a woman whose silence commands, whose order contains, whose loyalty never fully soothes the ache it addresses.

In Wiles, Trump may see a second chance to earn the approval he never quite captured from Mary Anne. And in his loyalty to her, one glimpses the enduring truth of psychodynamic theory: that the past is never past. It is alive, enacted, and dressed in new clothes—this time, in a red blazer, seated quietly in the West Wing, holding the world’s most unmanageable man in the palm of her maternal hand.

References:

Why I Am Speaking Out Now

Why I have not spoken out like this before

kevingdrendel2 Comments

People ask me why I didn’t speak out negatively against the Biden Administration. It’s true, I didn’t speak out (as much) against the Biden administration as I do now against the Trump administration.

To be clear, I did not vote for Joe Biden. I also did not vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I am a lifelong conservative and I have voted Republican most of the time throughout most of my life, with few exceptions, mostly on a local level.

I would be classified as a compassionate conservative. On some scales, I come out as a “classic liberal.” I believe in the freedom of speech, individual rights, and basic constitutional protections for all people, but I am not a Democrat, and I never have been.

As a conservative, and as a human being, I have some of the same concerns that Democrats do. We just approach things differently. For the most part, I am not confident in large government. I have seen too much bureaucracy, waste, and abuse in state governments and large municipalities to have much confidence in large government.

At the same time, I recognize weaknesses in my conservative position that have become accentuated over the years. For instance, large business is not any better than large government, and could be even worse.

A problem for the political system as a whole is the amount of money that pours into the political process. It has grown exponentially over my lifetime. Money begets greed, self-interest, and corruption in ways that are not healthy for our politics.

The amount of money accessible to politicians has a strong negative effect on our political system. If you look at the data of the wealth of politicians when they begin as “public servants” and retire, the amount of wealth that politicians accumulate is staggering and indicative of a major problem in American politics. I believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, as the Bible says, and the amount of money in the political system is a corrupting influence.

But , I digress. None of that explains why I have spoken out more over the last year against the Trump administration than I did against the Biden administration. I thought the Biden administration was inept. It seemed clear that Biden was being propped up and pushed forward, but he was not controlling what was going on. The disparate interest groups in the Biden administration and the Democratic Party as a whole that push extreme agendas that much of the country is uncomfortable with were problematic. But political processes still operated. There was a strong Republican Party, albeit with its own issues.

I did speak out about the fact that Congress has become a lame duck branch of government. Over many years, beginning at least with the Clinton administration going forward, presidents have wielded more and more executive power, issuing executive orders to make sweeping changes that were never intended to be part of the power of the executive branch.

I believe one reason for that is that Congress is often unable to reach a consensus that will pass both houses of Congress. We are more polarized now than we were 50 years ago. There is no middle ground. Politicians in the middle get taken out by their own party. So we have no consensus-building block that is essential to allow Congress to adopt laws and overhaul laws like our immigration law when needed. Therefore, presidents rule by the stroke of a pen with an executive order, and that has become the norm. I have been talking about that for many years.

What we are seeing now is the fallout of those many years of allowing Congress to languish in passivity while we became accustomed to presidents creating law with the stroke of a pen. Executive orders were never intended to be the way our system operates, but it is the present reality. The Trump administration is the natural result of that failure.

Donald Trump is taking the momentum of decades of American political processes and stretching them to their inevitable conclusions, which is a king-like authority in the executive branch, where the president can do just about whatever the president wants to do with impunity, including ignoring legal precedent and law and becoming a law unto himself.

Speaking of legal precedent, our Supreme Court process, our process for appointing Supreme Court justices and lower court justices has become more and more political over the years. Things took a turn for the worse with the Bork confirmation hearings, which was an absolute political circus. I have been speaking out against that for years, because it undermines the integrity of the judicial branch of government. It was never meant to be hyper-politicized. Justices were meant to be appointed because of their judicial reputation and acumen. Judges were not meant to be political hacks or political puppets. They were meant to be truly independent, the best and the brightest.

Of course, human nature being what it is, conservative presidents would tend to appoint conservative justices, and liberal presidents would tend to appoint liberal justices. But the history of American jurisprudence shows that merit, judicial acumen, and proven judicial ability were at the top of the list of qualifications. That is no longer the case. Presidents and parties make no bones about who they want as their judicial candidates. They want people who are going to decide cases according to the party line, and that is coming home to roost now also.

Donald Trump thinks that he can tell justices how to rule and how to apply the law, or, in some cases, how to ignore the law. Donald Trump just fired hundreds of immigration judges so that he can replace them with immigration judges who will rule exactly as he wants them to.

That is not how the executive branch and judicial branch should be interacting with each other. The judicial branch is specifically meant to be a foil to the executive branch. The judicial branch is meant to stand independently so that it can be a check and balance on the other branches of government.

What we are seeing today is the complete erosion of this check and balance system that was established in our Constitution. It is completely breaking down and devolving into supreme authority in the executive branch.

I don’t blame Donald Trump for the erosion of the check and balance system in our government. It’s been happening for a long time.

I do blame him for being an opportunistic extremist. He is an opportunist who sees the reality, and he has no qualms about exploiting and taking advantage of it. He is a bad actor, in my opinion, who is driving a proverbial truck through a gaping hole in our system.

When I speak out, I am not just speaking out against the Trump administration. I am speaking out as a warning signal about where we are in the history of our country.

We are at a tipping point. Our system is caving in and collapsing. I am afraid it’s already too late, and part of the problem is that we are so focused on our partisan politics, so willing to excuse and defend our own party and our own party line that we cannot see the collapse of our system of government as it is happening in front of our eyes. 

Perhaps, more personally, I have been a lifelong conservative because I thought the Republican Party would protect the rule of law and the integrity of the Constitution. I thought the Republicans would conserve the basic freedoms we have and hold us back from a progressive erosion of the foundational components of Constitution and law.

What alarms me most about the Trump Administration is that he has taken it the other direction and is knocking down whole walls and structural elements of our Constitution to impose his will on the country. He is intentionally pushing every boundary in the direction of expansive executive power, and the Republican party won’t stand up to him.

The Trump Administration is running rough shod over due process protections, ignoring the First Amendment, and actively attempting to reinterpret and rewrite the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, among other things. These are staple protections of our freedom. Trump is undoing fundamental protections at breakneck speed and overwhelming the court system, and I see an immediate threat to the seams of our democracy that are ready to burst and break open. These actions betray every conservative nerve in my body, and that is why I am speaking out now.

Where are the conservative stalwarts standing up to him? Most conservatives are cheering or at least looking the other way as Trump and his motely crew of hacks dismantle the fabric of our law.

~~~~~~~~~~~

So, stepping down from my soapbox, let me know where I am coming unhinged. Give me some hope. Disagree me if you see it differently. I am not unable to listen to contrary voices, and (in fact) need some fresh perspective at times to balance me out. Thank you ahead of time.

Is the American Church a House Divided Against Itself?

Whether God for us or against us is the wrong question.

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I have yet to find my equilibrium after the Charlie Kirk killing. I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I didn’t follow him. I heard him speak one time at an event in which Ravi Zacharias was the keynote speaker, but I never watched, or listened, or read anything from Charlie Kirk online. I didn’t agree with his Republican apologetic, though I couldn’t have identified anything Charlie Kirk specifically said before his death.

Since his death, I have heard and read testimony of his love for Jesus. His wife, Erika, publicly forgave his killer in an ultimate act of sacrificial obedience to Jesus.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy will always be that of a follower of Jesus and a staunch Republican, friend and defender of Donald Trump, who maintained political views opposed to mine.

I am a born again Christian. I believe in the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of my sins and his resurrection from the dead. I believe the Bible is the word of God and His revelation to mankind. I read the Bible daily. I believe there is only one path to God, and that is through Jesus Christ. I go to church every Sunday, and I am involved in Wednesday evening and Saturday morning Bible studies.

I have been a Christian for 45 years. The fundamentals of my faith have not changed in that time, but I have gone down some side roads from which I had to retreat back to a more orthodox faith. I was tempted by the prosperity gospel, and I once embraced an Americanized Christianity verging on idolatry.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God has not changed during my life (or at any time since the foundation of the earth), but I have changed often, as I have had to adjust my thinking, confess my sin, and allow my mind to be transformed by God’s Word and the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life.

I am a work in progress, of course. I have yet to arrive at any final destination, but I look forward with yearning for the day when I see Him face to face, and I will know as I am fully known!

I used to believe that all true Christians should (and therefore must) believe all of the same things about everything. That makes sense in a rationalistic way because we all have the same Holy Spirit, and we all read the same Bible, so we all should believe exactly the same things about everything. Right?

Continue reading “Is the American Church a House Divided Against Itself?” →

The Importance of Separating from the Culture, Politics, and Spirit of Our Age

We are called to be in the world but not of the world or influenced by the world

kevingdrendel1 Comment

I have become hyper vigilant about the influence of our current times, culture, politics, etc. on my theology. We can’t help ourselves but to struggle with the currents of our times as they threaten to push us along in their path.

We might find ourselves swept along without even noticing it. Or we might take the opposite course and fight against those currents in the opposite direction. Both responses are problematic for the Christian who desires to follow Christ and to live according to his kingdom that is not of this world.

Whether we are being carried along by the currents of this present world, or fighting in opposition to them, we can find ourselves being wholly defined by the world – what we are for and what are against – instead of the purpose and commission Christ Jesus gave to us. Both types of responses to the world lead us off the path of following Jesus.

My views on this come from a sermon I heard in my early twenties 40 some years ago. I forget the biblical texts that laid the foundation, but the foundation remains with me: whether we allow the currents of our world to sweep us along or we fight in opposition to those currents, we are constantly in danger of defining ourselves and our theology in relation to the world – rather than in relation to God and His kingdom.

If we are followers of Jesus Christ, we might look at times as if we are going in the direction of the world. At other times, we might look as if we are going in direct opposition to the world. In reality, the Christian who follows Christ is walking a straight path. His path will take us at times in the same direction the world around us seems to be going and at other times in the opposite direction.

Christopher Watkin calls this Christian phenomenon “diagonalization” because it often looks like we are working at cross purposes to the world in both directions. As the world is pushes left, we appear to be pulling right; and as the world pushes right, we appear to be pulling to the left.

The key is that we should not allow ourselves to be defined by the world around us. We should be influenced and defined by God alone and His revelation to us found in the Bible.

I made one statement above that is not exactly true. I do remember one verse on which the sermon that influenced me so many years ago hung: “It is good that you grasp one thing, and also not let go of the other; for the one who fears God comes forth with both of them.” (Ecclesiastes 7:18) I call this holding things in tension.

We do this with the Bible itself. We learn to hold things in tension. Our fear (respect) for God and His word compels us to grasp one thing we know to be true while not letting go of other things we know to be true – even when it is difficult holding onto both things.

We fear (respect, trust) that God has greater perspective than we do. When He tells us to hate sin as He hates sin and to love people (who are all sinners), we need to grasp and hold onto both things as true, even though they may seem (to us) to be in tension with each other.

When we do that, we find that we come forward with both truths and a better understanding of Truth (capital T). We understand, for instance, that God hates sin because of what it does to us and to the rest of His creation, among other things.

As finite beings, we always have an understanding gap. Even when we think we know something, we are ignorant of what we don’t know. The Bible describes that reality by saying that God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts.

We all know “religious” people who are hard, self-righteous, and unloving. They find it easier to hold onto the idea that God hates sin and more difficult to grasp the love God has for people who sin. We also know people who tolerate, accept, and even embrace sin in everyone (including themselves) because they feel that the tension between love for people and hating sin is too difficult to navigate.

People tend to want to gravitate to one end or the other of a spectrum of thoughts that seem to be in tension with each other because it might seem simpler and make more sense to us. For instance, some people reject the idea that human beings can even know truth because of our finitude, while others (in rejecting this post modern skepticism) double down arrogantly on the things we think we know. If we hold these things in tension, we reject the idea that human beings cannot know truth while we remain humble in what we think we know.

The person who fears God, grasps the one thing without letting go of the other. We may not do this perfectly well, but we understand that both of these things are true, and we strive to hold them in tension.

I have taken longer to get to the point than I expected, so I am going to finish this train of thought now by tying it back into the opening paragraph. What does this have to do with influence of the currents of the culture, politics, and spirit of our times on our theology?

Continue reading “The Importance of Separating from the Culture, Politics, and Spirit of Our Age” →

On the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate and Reeds Blowing in the Wind

Should Christians be influenced by shifting political winds?

kevingdrendel3 Comments

I recall today the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate award from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In back in 1968. When I was 8 years old, Laugh In was a hip variety show of biting political humor that was mostly lost on my young mind. The award was a dubious honor ceremoniously presented each week to public figures, corporations, and government agencies for ridiculous “achievements”.

The Fickle Finger of Fate suggests the unpredictable and arbitrary nature of luck or destiny. As finite human beings, we don’t control our fates, and we cannot know the twists and turns that await us in the future.

The award has an ironic backstory. Star Trek was moved from the coveted 7:00 PM spot to the dreaded 10:00 PM “death slot” by NBC to make room for Laugh In. The hip, comedic variety show, however, was popular only for a relatively a short stint from 1968 to 1973 and has largely been forgotten by all but impressionable young minds.

Star Trek, on the other hand, went on to become an iconic science fiction series. It was ahead of its time, and it became a hit in off-network syndication, inspiring sequels and movies for almost 50 years.

Fate is certainly a fickle thing. Driven by polls and ratings to attract the largest audience, NBC obviously did not foresee the lasting success of the Star Trek brand. They also did not expect the short-lived lifespan of their cutting edge variety show that replaced Star Trek.

As Christians, we don’t believe in fate, of course. We don’t believe in random chance. We believe in God who designed and ordered the universe and established our place in it.

The future, however, is equally unknowable to us. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said thousands of years ago, “God set eternity in the heart of man, but not so that he can know the end from the beginning.” (Ecc. 3:11). The Prophet Isaiah said it this way,

“’For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,’
declares the Lord.
‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.'”

Isaiah 58:8-6

God famously, but lovingly, rebuked Job for insisting on understanding things he could not fathom. As with Job, we are invited to have faith and to trust God, but we have more reason for hope and trust than Job, because we know our redeemer lives. He rose from the dead!

We understand that God can be trusted because of His willing demonstration of love for us in emptying Himself to become a man and laying down His life for us. We have no option but to trust Him, but we know we can trust him because of His love for us that He demonstrated on the cross.

Still, we easily are easily swayed and influenced by external pressures. We may think that we understand the times when we are only blowing in the shifting winds of “fate” (powers and principalities that want to blow us off course).

Paul says these powers and principalities are operative in the world. They are “spirits of the age” that play us like instruments if we are not grounded in the Word of God and led by His Holy Spirit.

Jesus used the phrase, reed blowing in the wind, when he addressed a crowd that went into the wilderness to see John the Baptist: “Did you you go to see a “reed swayed in the wind?” (Matt. 11:7-18)

John the Baptist was not just a curiosity. He was not a fleeting personality (like Rowan & Martin) with no lasting importance or purpose. He was the messenger of the Messiah, foretold by the prophets preparing the way for Jesus, the suffering servant who would take away the sins of the world. John was an agent in God’s eternal plan, and Jesus was (and is) the key figure in that plan.

Though he was foretold by the Prophets, no one knew exactly how things would unfold – not even God’s own people. In fact, they didn’t recognize God’s Messiah or receive him when he came. (John 1:11). Crowd of common people were drawn to Jesus, but smarter and more prestigious religious leaders were not.

Many have come, and many have gone. Many have claimed to be the harbingers of promise and special knowledge in their times, but many have proven wrong in their predictions.

The reality is that we do not know what we do not know. We must ever remain open to letting God’s Word shape us and direct us, and we must ever remain attentive to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us in applying His Word in our times.

Even now, smart people – including learned, religious people – believe and act as if they know the times. It is the same in every age and every generation, but we are easily swayed and blown by the winds of fate and human influence that seek to drive the course of history not always in ways that are aligned with God’s plan and purposes. To that generation, and to ours, Jesus said:

“They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:
‘We played the pipe for you,
    and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
    and you did not mourn.’”

Matt. 11:16-17

Human tendency is to trust ourselves. The smarter we are, the more we trust in our own ability to figure it out. Perhaps, this explains why so many scientists and PhD’s are atheists. Perhaps, this is why so many of the religious leaders in the time of Jesus were blind leaders of the blind. Perhaps, we are susceptible to the same error.

We don’t know the end from the beginning. We don’t know God’s thoughts unless He reveals them. God doesn’t dance to the tunes we play. Our tunes are often just riffs on the spirits of our age changing as those spirits change their tunes that we follow.

I reflect on these things as I think through changes in the winds influencing the evangelical church in my lifetime.. We need to be grounded in the Word of God and in tune with the Spirit of God. (See Hearing the Voice of God for Today) if we are not, we become reeds blowing in the wind.

A few weeks ago, I created a short list of issues on which Evangelicals (my tribe) have swayed in the political winds during my lifetime. I have done some research to confirm and correct my intuitions, and that exercise has confirmed my suspicions that we have, indeed, been reeds blowing in the political winds over the last 60 years. Following are just a few examples.

Continue reading “On the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate and Reeds Blowing in the Wind” →